I Don’t Feel Your Pain – “A recent study shows that people, including medical personnel, assume black people feel less pain than white people…. In each experiment, the researchers found that white participants, black participants, and nurses and nursing students assumed that blacks felt less pain than whites.” – original research article.

Accelerating adaptive evolution in humans – “In my last post, I noted R.A. Fisher’s argument that a larger population leads to more mutations and greater potential for adaptive evolution. As human populations have undergone massive growth over recent tens of thousands of years, we would expect the evidence of this population growth to show in our genomes. In this post, I point to a couple of papers that look at this evidence.” – from jason collins.

How Long Can You Wait to Have a Baby? – “[M]illions of women are being told when to get pregnant based on statistics from a time before electricity, antibiotics, or fertility treatment. Most people assume these numbers are based on large, well-conducted studies of modern women, but they are not.”

Grandparents effect spotted in British class system – “Children’s eventual position in Britain’s class system is closely linked to that of their grandparents, not just their parents, academics say. And where parents have ‘dropped down’ the socio-economic ladder, the so-called ‘grandparents effect’ often pulls them back up, research suggests…. [A]mong men with both parents and grandparents in the highest socio-economic group, 80% stayed in those positions when they were adults. But among men whose parents had been upwardly mobile, only 61% stayed in the group they had been born in to.” – don’t they mean the “regression to the mean effect’? – via jason collins.

Clues in the Cycle of Suicide – “Every year, suicide peaks with the tulips and lilacs — increasing roughly 15 percent over the annual average to create one of psychiatry’s most consistent epidemiological patterns. It may seem perverse that the period of spring and early summer … should contain ‘a capacity for self-murder that winter less often has.’ Yet it does.”

Sardinian family’s tip for a long life: minestrone – and good longevity genes! (~_^) – “Luca Deiana, a professor of clinical biochemistry at the university of Sassari in Sardinia, who has studied some 2500 centenarians on the island since 1996, was quoted by Corriere della Sera at the time as saying the longevity of local inhabitants was influenced by genetics along with environmental, nutritional and lifestyle habits.”

Mysterious Pair Buried With Flowers — Oldest Example Yet – “The pair — an adult male and an adolescent of undetermined sex — belonged to the primitive Natufian culture, which flourished between 15,000 and 11,600 years ago in an area that is now Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.”

“it’s not impossible, but it’s not easy either. esp. given that not all of the questions are worded very clearly. =/”

You’re being far too rational for the HBD crowd. Try something like “it’s not impossible, those derpy black folk just don’t know nuthin’! I’m so mad at them, and now I have biology to back me up!” Because science is fundamentally restricted to whatever our present means of acquiring repeatable testable information happens to be (e.g. sequencing DNA — let’s just ignore all those epigenetic confounds. Recent environmental exposures for ancestral populations couldn’t possibly affect their extant descendants because otherwise GWAS would all be questionable, and then now where would we be?!?)”

“Not sure if this is to the point, but I’ve long assumed that people took to agriculture out of necessity, not choice — that population pressure and the competition for good hunting and gathering grounds forced the weakest tribes to the margins, where feeding on wild grasses began out of semi-desperation to supplement an otherwise inadequate diet of game, fruit, nuts, roots, berries, etc. Just think how much work it is to change wheat seeds to bread. This might help account for nutritional deficiencies in early horticultural societies, if indeed that is what the evidence shows.”

It could have been like that but i’m more inclined to the opposite view i.e. particular spots where there was an abundance of wild gathered food and these spots became special to the H-G group that controlled them and therefore subsequently morphed into a religious site with a priesthood who eventually start to manage the resource.

“It may seem perverse that the period of spring and early summer … should contain ‘a capacity for self-murder that winter less often has.’ Yet it does.””

My theory on this is people who get down during winter are too down to actually do it. When spring comes they start to get out of it *but* there’s a transition point where they’re better enough to be physically capable of motivating themselves to do it and still down enough to want to.

So the critical point isn’t when they’re 100% down but when they’re coming out of it and are 3/4 down and 1/4 better.

Can insulin production and insulin sensitivity be inherited separately? You could get high sensitivity and and high production.

Doesn’t seem like there is any reason why not, unless the alleles at the locii implicated in one phenotype have other alleles giving rise to the other phenotype.

African and Asian mixes seem like they’d have a similar condition to Europeans some suspectability to both conditions (somewhat insulin resistant, somewhat hypoinsulinaemic) but some F2s would have both rather resistant and rather hypoinsulinaemic, while some would produce sufficient or high levels of insulin and not be insulin resistant (I don’t know if this would cause problems of its own though, in the form of an “overly lean” phenotype).

In the earlier comment thread on this when hbdchick called this up I thought it might help explain patterns in obesity – as insulin resistance, the African condition, seems to have more of an association with obesity than hypoinsulinaemia, the Asian condition, mirroring racial differences in within country obesity – but after thinking some more that probably wouldn’t pan out, if folks with Amerind ancestry show the Asian pattern (or a more extreme variant thereof) net of European and African admixture.

Heh, although not (though this is basically already implied by you, but maybe to clarify for some readers of the comment thread) because people regress to their grandparents phenotype more than their parents, but because if the grandparents show the same phenotype as the parents, its more likely more due to good or bad genetic luck (which gets passed on from parents to kids) and less likely due to environmental luck (which doesn’t).

(i’m pretty sure that this is the same person who did this a couple of times before, and i asked them nicely then to stop, but they obviously refuse. if someone wants to act sophomoric — or just moronic — on the internet, they can head over to 4chan or half-a-million other sites. if it wasn’t the same person as before … well, sorry, life can be hard sometimes.)

the reason i don’t like sock puppetry is because other commenters here are not going to know with whom they’re discussing. I can (sorta) see who everyone is, ’cause i can see everyone’s ips — but you guys out there can’t (unless you’re all a bunch of wizard-hackers!).

Yes, there is a regression to the mean effect for each class level. The article doesn’t cite any heritable cause though. Ian Deary is more to the point on contributing causes of social mobility at 25:20 here:

@matt – “…but because if the grandparents show the same phenotype as the parents, its more likely more due to good or bad genetic luck (which gets passed on from parents to kids) and less likely due to environmental luck (which doesn’t).”

@grey (and @luke) – “It could have been like that but i’m more inclined to the opposite view i.e. particular spots where there was an abundance of wild gathered food and these spots became special to the H-G group that controlled them and therefore subsequently morphed into a religious site with a priesthood who eventually start to manage the resource.”

“About 69 million tonnes of apples were grown worldwide in 2010, and China produced almost half of this total. The United States is the second-leading producer, with more than 6% of world production. Turkey is third…”

“Recent DNA analysis of modern domesticated wheat compared with wild wheat has shown that its DNA is closest in sequence to wild wheat found on Mount Karaca Dağ 20 miles (32 km) away from the site, suggesting that this is where modern wheat was first domesticated.”

comments do not require an email -- or even logging in. your very first comment must be approved by me. no sock puppetry. UNCIVIL COMMENTS WILL NOT BE APPROVED. thankuverymuch. Cancel reply

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